What gets you wet? And what does art have to do with it? In two separate collections of essays, art historian Rosemary Betterton and artist Mira Schor take up these sticky questions, connecting art, women, and the fluids your body produces, takes in, craves, and reviles.

Betterton's An Intimate Distance considers representations of, and largely by, women, in a series of essays on topics ranging from British suffrage to contemporary food art. The title refers to the woman artist's ...